For the first one, I cut out little kidney bean shaped jelly beans from construction paper. For the second, we used real jelly beans, which are usually pretty easy to find year round. I tried to stick with the colors that come in most packages.

First, as always, we did our construction paper craft. But instead of one big letter that we decorated, we did a bunch of little letters.

I had cut out a pile of Letter Js and a rounded top so that my kids could make their own jellyfish with the letters as tentacles.

And googly eyes. I swear they get more excited about the letters that need eyes…

Then for our Letter Sorting activity, where they needed to separate out the capital and lowercase letters, I went with jack o’ lanterns.

My kids were still kind of little at this point in out Alphabet Activities, so I had cut out the pumpkins and faces ahead of time and all they did was glue the finished jack o’ lantern to the paper before gluing on the letters.

Now that they’re older, I might still have cut out the face pieces but I would have let them make the faces themselves first, probably from a selection of eyes and mouths.

Back to the chalk!

I love that my girls love being outdoors, so chalk letters are great way to get them moving.

I drew a bunch of big Letter Js to represent the word “jump.” And then we did just that – jump from J to J.

This was a TON of fun for my girls.

The night before Letter J Day, I made a couple of boxes of Jell-O in a big plastic bin and I threw a bunch of toys into it that started with the Letter J.

I didn’t get all fancy with worrying about where the toys would stay once the Jell-O solidified. I just tossed ’em in. Most of the toys floated to the top, but they were still partially submerged and, thus, still had to be dug out by little fingers that were eager to get messy.

We did it outside to keep the mess out of the house, but I suppose you could do it on a tile floor somewhere if you covered it in a tarp or with a tablecloth.

We made a pile of the toys in another bin (the sand castle-shaped container you see at the bottom), and then we rinsed off everything with the hose when we were done.

I cut out the J shapes with our letter cookie cutters, then slathered the toast in some butter and strawberry jelly.

I didn’t want to make a big, complicated dinner in between our projects, so I kept things simple with this chicken.

I marinated a package of boneless thighs in some Jamaican Jerk Marinade that I picked up in the supermarket and threw them on a grill pan. Easy Peasy. (Don’t forget to have the Little Ones seek out the Letter J on the bottle of marinade!)

That’s it for Letter J! Except for the free printable worksheets I made, which you can get here:

The island itself, in the shape of an uppercase I, is cut from brown paper. I made some little palm trees ahead of time (I free-handed those and they must have been close enough because my daughter knew what they were ;).

They we used some craft sand to represent the beach. You can sometimes find craft sand in the same place where they sell artificial flowers, or just in the craft section.

We probably should have tried gluing the trees down first, but my daughter was excited about the sand. We used white glue (not glue sticks) for this project, though, so that helped with getting the palm trees to stick to the sand once the glue below it was dry.

For our Letter Sorting, we made inchworms.

And watched the Sesame Street version of the Inchworm Song:

Then we tried to make marshmallow igloos.

This particular attempt didn’t work. We spread white glue all over a Styrofoam dome, and tied to stick mini marshmallows to it.

They fell off.

It occurred to me a few days afterwards that what we should have done instead was to slather the dome in white cake icing (icing is an I word!) and stick the marshmallows into that. That would have totally worked. And if I owned a dome cake pan we could have made a cake interior for our marshmallow igloo.

Next time.

Or, you know, you could just turn a bowl upside down and slather that with icing. There are actually plenty of options.

Either way, I would suggest having a separate (small) bowl of marshmallows available for snacking, to help keep the kiddos from eating the ones for the project.

You glue down some course salt or raw sugar and, once the glue is dry, add some watercolor paints.

We used kosher salt which was attached via glue stick.

It’s a fun way to play with texture. Just make sure you shake off all of the excess salt once the glue is dry and before you paint. That way you won’t end up with pieces of salt in your watercolor tray.

Oh – and this project is meant to represent an “Icee,” which is a crushed ice drink. Just in case that’s not a thing where you lived and you were wondering why I spelled “icy” incorrectly. ;)

I found this really cool ice cream shaped chalk at the dollar store, so we did some chalk drawings.

We often do practice our letters with chalk, but it was even more exciting this time around. :)

Then, we used our ice cream shaped chalk to trace around some letters we made out of sticks we found in the yard.

This was a lot of fun, especially since my girls love puzzles. I still have these in our Folder Games binder.

You can find similar things by doing an internet search, but these are a color matching worksheet with ice cream cones and an insect shadow matching worksheet which I got from Busy Little Bugs.

First we found all the states that began with our letter of the day, colored them and the letters in the title green, and then my daughter colored the rest of the map however she felt like it. (We also underlined the “island” part of Rhode Island.)

We made a construction paper Hamburger, and although my daughter didn’t put it together quite as I had conceived she would, we still got the point across. :)

I had cut out an H in brown to represent the burger patty, and there’s a bun in orange, a tomato in red, lettuce in green, and some Swiss cheese in white.

I also made a lowercase H and cut out some pieces in white that vaguely represented a horse’s head, tail, and hooves.

And my kids always love combining glue and construction paper, but if you throw in a googly eye then it’s really a party.

For our Letter Sorting, I cut out two shapes that looked kind of like houses and drew on some doors and windows and roof shingles. My daughter was pretty young when I did this, but she’s old enough now that I’d let her draw the doors and windows herself if we did it again.

Then she put the lowercase Hs on one house and the uppercase on the other.

Making Hidden Messages was pretty fun. This was the example I did for her, and I can’t remember why I don’t have a picture of the one she did. I think I didn’t photograph as well.

Anyway, you draw designs on a white piece of heavy or construction paper with a white crayon, and then you paint over it with water colors.

The crayon resists the paint and your designs show through.

You could always prep some hidden messages for them, kind of like I did. I used Letter H words: Hi, Hello, and Howdy.

Hopscotch is always a big hit in our house, and it’s great for practicing numbers.

This time I drew a big and little H at the start of the Hopscotch.

You could also make a version that’s like our Power Word Hopscotch, and fill the squares with H words (Hi, Hello, Hand, Happy, etc.) instead of numbers and have your child shout out the words as they hop over the board.

This was SO much fun. After discussing how “hula” started with H, we pretty much went right into dancing and dressing up.

During the summertime, it’s pretty easy to find hula skirts and leis at the local dollar stores around here. Or you could try a party store or check online.

Then we danced to some videos, including The Hula Song from The Lion King (just for laughs):

Then we watched the He Mele No Lilo scene from Lilo & Stitch:

And finally, we watched a more traditional He Mele No Lilo. My girls really loved this and we watched it over and over, dancing along with them. My older daughter also spent some time studying the little girls and the way they moved:

Then it was back to our projects…

I found these little wooden helicopters in the craft section of Walmart.

I think I paid about a dollar apiece for them.

After we painted them, we attached some of the little foam letter stickers that I had picked up in the bargain section of Target.

You can also see our LeapFrog Fridge Phonics magnet in the background (which is the older version of this one and kind of similar to this bucket set), because – of course – we had to discuss how both Hungry and Hippos started with H before we went on a crazy marble-eating rampage.

This was a fun activity for practicing fine motor skills.

I found some plastic hard hats and the dollar store and we hammered some gold tees into a piece of Styrofoam with a rubber mallet.

This one definitely needs close supervision because you may have to hold the golf tee steady for them at first or (preferably) you may want to stick it in the foam a little before allowing them to hammer it further down.

But it was fun. And we still play with the hats sometimes. :)

It just wouldn’t be Letter H day without a discussion of my favorite play.

My girls are quite familiar with Shakespeare and a few of his plays, and one of these days I’ll get around to posting some of the Hamlet crafts and recipes we’ve done, but for now you can still see some of the kid-friendly books about him.

The one pictured above is from the very first Usborne book I ever purchased (which has led to a serious obsession with Usborne, but that’s a little off topic). It’s called Illustrated Stories from Shakespeare, and is filled with gorgeous paintings and a story version of Hamlet and five other plays that are short enough to read to children.

Depending on the age of your kids, there’s also the Shakespeare Sticker Dressing, recommended for age 5 and up, where you can dress up characters from the plays (like Hamlet) with stickers, and then there’s also the incredible Where’s Will book that’s like a “Where’s Waldo” book but with characters from Shakespeare’s plays (like Hamlet). The second book is recommended from ages 7 and up (and I really bought it for myself anyway….) but even my three-year-old enjoyed searching with me.

We recently did some Power Words Hopscotch to help my daughter practice her vocabulary.

I drew a hopscotch board on the driveway in chalk and filled it with some of her Power Words (also known as Sight Words). Most of the words were ones she kept missing, but I also threw in some she knew well as encouragement.

One of the reasons we did a game like this – with her calling out each word as she jumped to it – was because she’s supposed to know these words on sight instead of having to sound them out each time.

And my daughter is always in a hurry, always rushing through her reading, so she often doesn’t take the time to sound things out anyway. She just guesses. One of the most important things in the world to me is that reading is fun for my kids, so instead of sitting her down and having her get frustrated and upset at herself, I’ve been trying to incorporate more learning activities that include movement and laughter.

Because for as much as I read to her every day, and as much as she would ask me to read to her, she wasn’t in a hurry to learn herself. To keep up with her classmates, though, she needs to practice. So we’ve been playing “games” instead of just sitting in a chair and going over flashcards again and again. ‘Cause that’s even boring for mommy….

This one was a suggestion from her teacher and it worked out really well. The chalk lasted for days (it didn’t rain) and every day for a week she would ask to go out and play hopscotch, including each time we were getting in and out of the car for school.

Plus, she called out the words for her younger sister, so they could both play. Extra practice for the big sis, and a heartwarming moment thrown in for good measure. :)

I also love this concept of hopscotch for learning because of the versatility.

You could use this for other vocabulary words, of course, but also for just letters for the younger crowd. For example, if you’re working on some Alphabet Activities with your preschoolers, you could practice your alphabet by putting letters instead of the traditional numbers inside the squares.

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